I'm considering a similar setup, with the EVO version of that asus mobo.My question is, there's enough room for a discrete gpu using that heatsink? Or the hs takes too much space on such cramped mobos?

You know, I was looking at the discrete GPU as I installed the Noctua HSF and to be honest it seems like things may be somewhat cramped. The heatsink itself definitely leaves more than adequate room for a GPU, but the fan overhangs a little bit making it less definitive. The position of the fan on the heatsink can be adjusted quite a bit, probably +/- 1/4" in each direction, so you should be able to move it into a position that doesn't block anything.

Also, it seems like just about everything in a PC has some sort of size standard to adhere to, so I couldn't imagine any major manufacturer putting out a product that would disable certain scenarios that should work without a hitch in theory.

In short, yes, I think you should be able to add a discrete GPU to a system like this, although it may not be quite a simple and quick as it would be on a full sized ATX board.

On another note, I just found out about AHCI mode for SATA ports, and that boards default to the older IDE mode. Some people say you can only use AHCI with Windows 7 if it was enabled when you installed the OS. That wasn't the case for me, but I found a quick and simple registry workaround that fixed that problem in about 5 minutes. It basically made the OS check for AHCI and installed the driver for it after a restart.

AHCI offers good features like hotswapping and native command queuing, the latter being of particular interest to me as it should in theory reduce noise and increase the life of a drive. Make sure you enable AHCI before installing the OS if you want to use it!

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